Yet nearly two months on from its seemingly successful launch, Zuckerberg’s vision of stealing Twitter’s thunder may be little more than a pipe dream.
A week after its July 5 launch, daily active Threads users peaked at around 26.7 million, then gradually declined to around 13.5 million by month’s end, it said.
“Some celebrities who joined the platform before it was available to the public, such as Jennifer Lopez and Tom Brady, haven’t posted at all since launch week. MrBeast, the YouTube star who was the first user to reach 1 million followers on Threads, stopped posting about a month ago.”
“Threads was touted as the polite, politically correct alternative to Elon Musk’s X. But when the selling point of your platform is inoffensiveness, you can’t be surprised when users simply get bored,” Mr. Bokhari explained.
“X has become friendlier to edgy, dissident content that polite society would prefer to see banned, and that’s precisely why its users remain loyal.”
Free Speech Is Not the Only Concern
Yet, issues of free speech are far from the only concern.Users eager for a fresh experience encountered “a feed saturated with interactions between mega-corporations and consumer brands as” Mr. Denton said, comparing it to “stumbling into a virtual networking event for their social media managers.”
“Meta will truly need a miracle to save this platform from irrelevancy. If Zuckerberg can’t find a way to bring interesting content to the platform—content that people actually want to consume—Threads will be dead on arrival,” he predicted.
Not everyone is as pessimistic about the company’s future.
“There are 2.3 billion Instagram users, versus only 450 million Twitter users. That’s a 5x size advantage Threads has to tap into in terms of the Facebook-Instagram-WhatsApp economy into which Threads is being installed. You can’t underestimate that or rule it out. Especially with government and institutional support,” Mr. Benz said.
He added that, given Mr. Zuckerberg’s willingness to comply with the demands of the Biden administration, Threads may also benefit from being the app of choice for the U.S. national security state.
“Because Zuckerberg has proven to be such a reliable ally to the Pentagon and State Department, I would not be surprised if Threads begins to be pushed by the U.S. government for dissident groups funded by the U.S. national security state to use while organizing revolutions or resistance movements abroad,” he said, likening it to the State Department promoting Telegram in 2020 for the attempted color revolution in Belarus.
“It’s hard to predict at the moment,” Mr. Benz said. “… as the 2024 election approaches, or another pandemic scare, or some other crisis or high-stakes geopolitical event appears, the true nature of the threat posed by Threads will make itself more clear.”
However, others believe that Threads’ commitment to censoring the political fringes will prove fatal to its long-term survival.
“I don’t see a way for Threads to overtake Twitter/X in the microblogging domain,” said Mr. Epstein. “By minimizing moderation—which Facebook can’t do on Threads—Twitter is attracting more extreme content than it ever has before, and extreme content draws traffic. I don’t see a way for Facebook to compete with that.”
“Of course, it is always possible that Musk or his appointees will mismanage ”X” so badly that the company just implodes,” he continued. “Perhaps Zuckerberg is counting on that.”
Yet given Mr. Musk’s track record of building successful companies, most notably Tesla and SpaceX, some might argue that this possibility remains remote.
“I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together. Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly, 10s of millions of people now come back daily … way ahead of what we expected,” he wrote in late July.
“The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention. It‘ll take time to stabilize, but once we nail that then we’ll focus on growing the community. We’ve run this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc) and I’m confident Threads is on a good path too.”